


ghouls in the attic

by Speechwriter (batmansymbol)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, nobody asked for this, theres no archive warning for 'vaguely eerie by the end' so i assume yall will be fine
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-07 00:51:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17950445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/batmansymbol/pseuds/Speechwriter
Summary: Ron knows other people have glimpsed his insecurities, but nobody seems to know how threatening they feel, how all-consuming they could become. Nobody has understood. Nobody until him.this is a oneshot deathly hallows AU based on the fact that "i have seen your heart and it is mine" is just a batshit romantic thing for tom riddle to canonically say to ron





	ghouls in the attic

**Author's Note:**

> based on [my own tumblr shitpost](http://batmansymbol.tumblr.com/post/177828612217/the-most-romantic-line-in-the-whole-harry-potter). written entirely while procrastinating. goodbye

In the back of Ron’s mind there’s a boy who grew up in the Mirror of Erised.

When Ron was eleven, the boy in the mirror wore a badge with the letters “H.B.” He was older, like Charlie or Bill. He had won the house cup and the Quidditch cup, and he was dressed in Quidditch captain’s robes. The boy in the mirror was special, irreplaceable. Chosen.

Ron hadn’t realized he could imagine something so wonderful, let alone want it, until he saw it there before him.

Ever since, this other self has bobbed along at Ron’s side like the peripheral reflection he might see in shop windows walking down a city street, always identically in step, inescapable. But the boy in the mirror is always better, more accomplished. In third year, in the wake of Sirius’s escape, the boy in the mirror would not have broken his leg and spent the Time-Turner episode unconscious in the hospital wing; actually he would have been instrumental to the freeing of the innocent man and the innocent beast, and would have won Albus Dumbledore’s respect for it. In fourth year, the boy in the mirror would have hoodwinked the Goblet of Fire and been named Hogwarts Champion, and that other Ron Weasley would have walked into the Yule Ball with Hermione holding to his arm, pink-cheeked and smiling.

Every so often Ron brushes so closely against this imagined version of himself that he is electrified by the near contact. In fifth year, holding the Prefect’s badge in his hand as his mother cries out in pride, and then in sixth year, borne on the shoulders of Gryffindor house as they sing his name— _He didn’t let the Quaffle in!_ —he feels as if he’s turning to stare at that boy in the mirror, and for an instant, he sees himself precisely as he is. Triumphant and whole.

One year later, deep in a cold forest, Ron has never felt more distant from that boy.

He’s starving, as always, and it’s his turn to wear the heavy golden locket around his neck, and he’s lost in brooding thoughts about how Dumbledore must have told Harry  _something_. Albus Dumbledore wouldn’t have chucked Harry into this with so little information, would he? It’s impossible. There’s something Harry isn’t remembering, that has to be it...

 _Stop,_ he tells himself. It’s been a week since they lost Grimmauld Place as a refuge, a week since they managed to snatch the locket from Umbridge’s throat, and in those seven days, Ron has ridden this useless train of thought to its end dozens of times. He doesn’t want to resent Harry for any of this. He knows it’s not Harry’s fault they’re cold and tired and hungry and scared, really, he knows.

He tries to comfort himself with the weight of the locket.  _We’ve got one now,_ he reminds himself. Two, if he’s counting the diary, already destroyed, and they know where the snake is, and where it’s kept. So it’s really only three Horcruxes they have to find, only three more. 

Still, every time he tells himself all this, it feels less persuasive.

Ron turns over on the bunk bed in their tent, which smells faintly of old coffee. Exhausted as he is, he dreads falling asleep. Whenever he sleeps with this thing around his neck, the dreams are uneasy: vague darkness and the sensation of being probed, as if somebody is palpating his heart gently between their hands. And he’s so bloody  _hungry_. Not just for anything resembling a proper meal, but for security: the simple knowledge that if he falls asleep he won’t wake to something unimaginable.

Ron closes his eyes and lulls himself with vivid pictures. He imagines the boy in the mirror seated before a grand feast at Hogwarts. He’s found and destroyed the final Horcrux single-handed. His family are around him, safe and elated, so proud of him. He turns toward Hermione and he’s dead certain, for once, that he’s the one she wants to see in return ... the only one …

When he opens his eyes, he is somewhere else.

It must be sleep, but it feels impossibly real. Ron’s lucid enough to be surprised, suspicious. He’s standing on the steps of an old orphanage in Muggle London. When he reaches for the door, it swings open without a touch, admitting him.

Ron reaches for his wand, but it’s not in his pocket. He hesitates, then moves cautiously down the dingy hall until he hears voices. Off the hall is something like a living room. The furniture is shabby, the rug frayed, but the hearth is blazing and the floor swept clean. Ron knows instinctively that he cannot be seen by anyone inside. He slips in.

An older couple sit upon the sofa. They come from money; even with Muggles, Ron can tell that instantly. There’s a certain way they hold themselves, and when they speak, their accents are as smooth and soft as sand falling through an hourglass.

Across from them sits a boy in a chair. Dark hair, dark eyes. He can’t be more than seven years old, and his shoulders are folded in. He darts glances up at the older couple every so often as they ask him questions.

“What do you do for fun, lad?” says the man.

The boy eyes them both a second before answering. He seems unused to being looked at. When he replies, his voice is guarded. “I like to read.”

“A reader, John,” says the woman, sounding pleased, but the man's curiosity seems to have lessened.

“Any interest in sport?” he says.

The boy seems to sense he’s done something wrong. “Yes, I like sports,” he says quickly. “We don’t have much chance to play them, but I like listening to football when we can turn on the radio.”

“Ah ha,” says the man. “What’s your team?”

The boy searches the man. He’s aware that there’s a right answer, and he wants keenly to give it. Ron realizes he knows this as clearly as if he were reading the boy’s thoughts. The boy must not say the wrong thing. Any flaw is weakness, any weakness reason enough for rejection.

Ron knows more even than that. He feels the boy’s memories: the boy has been here, has sat in this seat, answered couples’ questions, dozens of times. Ever since he can remember, he has been subjected to these interviews, but he has always done something wrong. He must always have been found inadequate, because he is still here.

Before the boy can answer, there is a leap in time. Ron flinches at the reminder that he’s dreaming. Now he’s standing in the orphanage’s crowded dining room, far grubbier than the interview room. A few dozen children of various ages are crammed into the benches at the two tables, and the woman at the head of the room is announcing that Mr. and Mrs. Harding have chosen someone to go home with them, tomorrow actually, a very lucky boy, and Ron feels excitement running all through his body like a violin's bow drawn back and forth rapidly on the same string, and then the woman says the name:

“Daniel!”

Everyone looks to the corner where Daniel sits, a blond boy with an awestruck expression. Some of the children nearby feign happiness for him, put on a show of smiling and clapping his shoulder.

But Ron feels what the dark-haired boy feels. A kind of disappearing emptiness. He’s already scolding himself for having hoped: how could he have thought it would be him? Yet there is also the sense that the world is wrong and he is correct, that he  _could_  be special, that he could be so much if he were given the opportunity. 

With an odd start, Ron realizes he’s felt this before. The day Harry’s name issued from the Goblet of Fire, Ron had thought numbly,  _That could have been me. Why not me? For once, just once, why not me?_

One of the girls has begun to cry. She thought the Hardings liked her. The dark-haired boy, on the other hand, has shown no emotion at all, going back to his thin stew as if the announcement meant nothing. But Ron feels everything amplifying inside. Ringing through the boy’s bones is the type of sore disappointment brought on by years of repetition. This is yet another reminder that he is nothing to yet another prospective couple, that he was nothing to his parents, that he is nothing to anyone.

But there remains a pinprick of fire inside him. He is something to himself. When the world conspires to lose you inside its vastness, you must believe that there is something in you to be seen. This, too, Ron has felt before.

When he wakes up from the dream, he feels strange. Disassociated from the present and its attendant issues. For once, he even feels rested, and his injured arm—still delicate after his Splinching accident—seems close to painless.

When he wanders out of the tent into a surprisingly bright, warm day, Harry and Hermione, as always, are discussing where to go and what the next Horcrux could be, which reminds Harry: “I’ll take that, mate,” he says, holding a hand out to Ron. “Sorry, I forgot.”

“Oh. Me too,” Ron says. “Here.”

He lifts the locket from himself, but to remove the Horcrux doesn’t bring a feeling of lightness, nor relief. He feels just the same.

* * *

 

Three days pass before it’s Ron’s turn to wear the locket to sleep again. He spends the evening tense and expectant.

“Are you all right?” Hermione asks him.

“Fine,” he says vaguely. “Good soup, Hermione.”

She smiles, and Ron experiences fleeting pleasure before falling back into his thoughts.

He's been wondering all day if he’ll have another vision tonight. He's thought about the dream every hour since awakening from it. He has already silently acknowledged the boy’s identity; Harry told him Tom Riddle’s life story a long time ago, after all.

But Ron hasn’t told Harry or Hermione about the dream. He has a nagging feeling that he should, but what did he actually learn from the dream besides what they already know: that Riddle grew up in an orphanage? Better to wait, not to upset Hermione over nothing. He’s spying on the Horcrux somehow, looking into its contents, so maybe the next dream—if there is another dream—will be useful, like Harry’s visions. It might even be more useful than Harry’s visions, because Harry can rarely remember much of what he’s seeing or feeling, and those flashes of intuition hurt his scar violently, whereas Ron’s vision was cool and soothing and finely detailed.

There are other reasons he doesn’t tell Harry and Hermione. Other reasons he wants to return to that dream space. He tries not to think about them too much.

The truth is, Ron has spent most of his life suppressing feelings of inadequacy. He feels pathetic even acknowledging those feelings, because everyone in his family seems so free of envy, so secure in their individuality. Even Ginny, tasked to live up to even more older siblings than him, is unique from the outset by virtue of her gender.

He’s hinted at the feeling to Hermione a couple times, but he can’t admit how deep the vein penetrates. It seems to Ron that if he vocalized the fear— _no one will ever see me as special, never distinct_ —he would invite it to devour him. After all, what really accomplished person has ever wasted time feeling overlooked, unappreciated, second best? Harry has never felt anything like that, Ron’s sure of it. How could he? And so the fear is itself a small humiliation.

But in the dream, for the first time in his life, Ron saw that fear in someone else. He  _felt_ it. Riddle’s fear had the same weight as Ron’s own, near immeasurable in mass and density, the possibilities of anonymity and insignificance all pulling in like a black hole. It’s the sort of fear with the capacity to ruin, which must be battled off every waking hour with private reassurances.

After seventeen years, Ron has grown quick with his defense mechanisms. Jokes come near as quickly to him as they do to Fred and George, now, and he finds that the less he thinks about himself, the easier things are: he can lose his anxieties almost entirely in his feelings for Hermione, his kinship with Harry, his loyalty to his family. The drive to defeat You-Know-Who.

Still, sometimes he’s alone with himself, and in creeps the old idea that his self will never be enough.

It seems practically unbelievable that the boy-Riddle ever felt something so familiar, so human. But then, Ron muses, he wasn’t properly You-Know-Who yet, was he? Riddle was seven years old in the dream, for Merlin’s sake. That boy could have been Ron himself in another world, another lifetime. A boy in another kind of mirror.

When he falls asleep that night, he returns to the orphanage.

The night seems to last several months. It’s a river of moments Ron could have sworn he’d lived himself, dressed in different clothes. He’s riveted by what he sees, how immediately legible Riddle’s life is to him. So easily he can parse the hierarchy in the orphanage. The half-dozen staff members all have their favorites. They love the pretty girls best, the funny boys, or the charismatic ones, the Ginnies, Freds, and Bills. Riddle brings good marks home from the prison-like Muggle school he’s attended since age six, but the others, adults and children alike, remain either hostile to or indifferent toward him. The indifference is more corrosive, to the point that the hostility starts to feel like a gift, like an identity.

There is one moment, standing upon a London street, that the young Riddle sees a boy on the corner standing between his two parents. All three look incandescently happy. The boy is holding a present that they’ve bought him, and they’re gazing down at him with such concentrated love and affection that Riddle feels for a moment as if he’s looking into the sun, and he feels such fierce envy that it is like acid burning through his bloodstream.

Ron can hardly believe this moment. He’s experienced it near identically. He remembers standing in Diagon Alley, age 9, jostled away from his siblings, momentarily forgotten by father (deep in conversation with Charlie), and mother (fussing over Fred and George). Ron looked across the road and saw a boy there between his parents, licking a huge birthday ice cream, and imagined himself into the boy’s skin, feeling sick with jealousy. Not that he ever wanted parents other than his own, but every so often he has wanted his parents to be  _his_ , his alone, in a way that they never can be.

Not every memory is so relatable. Every so often Ron sees something far worse than anything he endured in his upbringing, jarring moments of physical violence. The young Riddle accepts these punishments dead-faced, and Ron is horrified but fascinated. It was normal back then, he supposes, but it doesn’t look normal, the bloodied palms, the violet ribbons of bruising across the forearm.

Ron recognizes the signs of magic before Riddle does, but Riddle cottons on with uncommon speed. By age eight he’s sitting alone in his room and training pebbles to leap over each other.

Ron remembers Harry saying something last year about how Riddle hurt animals, hurt the other children at the orphanage, but none of that appears. It doesn’t even feel real in concept. The tide of memory is too overwhelming, too vivid, drowns Ron’s thoughts and misgivings, so that the only real thing is the everyday agony of being forgotten.

The last thing Ron sees that night is an eleven-year-old Riddle getting dressed in his robes, paid for by the school, on the Hogwarts Express. One of the others in the compartment is glancing at him with a curled lip.

Riddle looks down at his robes. They are shabby hand-me-downs.

Ron wakes in bafflement. The carousel of shame, then defiance, then shame again—this thing Ron has felt all his life—is still tearing through him like shrapnel. This can’t be right, he thinks, staring at the wall of the flat inside the tent. How could You-Know-Who ever have been like  _that?_ Needled by the anxiety and self-consciousness of being dirt poor?

Ron shakes his head to clear it. He realizes with frustration that his mission has failed. He’d been looking for significant objects in the memories, anything that the young Riddle might have prized for a Horcrux, but the boy had owned practically nothing.

Now, though, as he starts thinking about the Horcruxes, he considers how Harry has been talking about Riddle.  _He’s got Riddle all wrong,_ Ron thinks with dawning realization. The way Harry talks about Riddle wanting to use founders’ objects as Horcruxes … Harry seems to think it’s because the young Riddle was grandeur-obsessed and power-starved from the beginning. But this child in the Horcrux … well, if he  _is_ ambitious, it’s because of this vacuum, isn’t it? It’s because of this feeling Ron knows too well, that he has to compensate for everything he is. If he  _does_  believe he’s special, it’s because he’s had to believe that much not to go utterly mental, isn’t it?

And if he  _does_  want valuable objects, isn’t that because he’s never had anything of his own before? Ron understands that, maybe even more than Harry could. Harry, for all his losses, has a vault of Gringotts gold, an Invisibility Cloak, a Firebolt, a title bestowed upon him since birth. For the last seven years, Harry has been lavished with his inheritance. Maybe he’s forgotten what it was like to be nothing.

Ron feels on the verge of uncovering some greater mystery. When Harry asks for the Horcrux over breakfast, Ron hesitates with his fingers on the cold metal of the locket. He needs to keep the Horcrux on a while longer, needs to think. He can’t wait another three days. Maybe this night will be the one he’ll spot a Horcrux, maybe this night will give him the key to an epiphany. He’s really starting to understand Riddle now. He can’t stop while he’s making progress like this. For the first time since they landed in these woods, he feels useful, like all this has a purpose.

He says, “Tell you what, shall I keep wearing it? I don’t feel like I’ve worn it at all. I slept really well, actually.”

Harry blinks, confused. He trades a look with Hermione that Ron doesn’t miss.

“Ron,” she says carefully, “are you sure that’s—well, are you sure that’s a good idea?” Hastily she adds, “I’m not suggesting you’re not up to it, but I wouldn’t want the Horcrux’s effects to compound on you unexpectedly, especially with your arm—”

“Hermione, I’m fine,” Ron says, sitting at the fireside and rubbing his hands together. “See? My arm’s nearly better.”

Harry thinks it over. “You do look all right,” he says. “Usually after wearing it a while, we’re all sort of hunched over.”

“Exactly,” Ron says.

“All right, then,” Harry decides. “If you’re sure.”

Hermione bites her lip. “Harry, I really don’t think it’s a good idea for him to—”

“Oi, I’m right here,” Ron says, annoyed. When Hermione flinches, he takes a slow breath and softens his voice. “Sorry. Look, Hermione, I’ll tell you if it starts getting worse, all right? Or you can tell me if I start turning into a festering toadstool without realizing.”

Hermione smiles weakly, but before she looks away, her eyes narrow at the Horcrux.

Ron remembers, then, what she said about growing close to the Horcrux, how Ginny poured herself into the diary and lost herself along the way. But this isn’t like the diary at all, Ron reasons. Writing is an active thing, that’s how Ginny physically gave bits of herself to Riddle. Ron’s only watching, and what can it do, watching? What can it do to listen?

* * *

 

On the third night, there are no memories.

Ron awakens in the woods, but they’ve changed. It’s summer. High noon. The breeze smells sweet and pollenated, and sunlight catches on the needles in the trees, as substantial as wool.

The young Riddle is seated on a boulder with his arms around his knees. He’s thirteen, maybe fourteen, and the hollows of his face have filled in, presumably thanks to years of Hogwarts feasts.

Ron realizes Riddle is looking at him. He takes an instinctive step back, wishing he were invisible again, but when he looks down at himself he realizes something else: he’s younger, too. Shorter and more ungainly, only just adolescent. He’s thirteen again.

“Who are you?” asks Riddle. His voice is newly broken. It retains a measure of childishness, but even as a seven-year-old he spoke smoothly and quietly, and that remains.

Ron nearly replies out of instinct, but stops with his mouth open.  _Don’t give yourself away,_ he reminds himself. If he’s careful, he can negotiate this. Riddle doesn’t seem entirely aware of where he is or what’s happening.

“You’re dreaming,” Ron says.

A look of mild confusion passes across Riddle’s face, but he looks up at the peaceful tremor of the forest’s branches, and he is content once more. “Of course I am,” he says. “I’m in the Forbidden Forest.”

“Er, yeah,” Ron says. “Yeah, that’s right. Are you here often?”

“Every few days,” Riddle says. “The gamekeeper says we’re not supposed to, but I like it in here. I can’t think in the common room with all of them breathing down my neck.”

“Who?”

Riddle waves his hand dismissively. “The others. They’re useful, I know, but they don’t understand. Sometimes they don’t even seem properly Slytherin. Ambition means you have to want something. They already have everything.”

Ron slowly sits on a boulder across from Riddle. He doesn’t want to startle him, shock him out of whatever trance this is. If the Horcrux doesn’t know this isn’t the Forbidden Forest, Ron has a sizable advantage.

“What  _do_  you want?” Ron asks.

Riddle shakes his head. “I should have found him by now,” he mutters.

“Found who?”

“My father. I know he was a great wizard. I know it. He had to be.” Riddle says the words like a mantra, and a pulse of desperate belief ripples out through the clearing. Ron feels it like a breeze.

“I just need to find out who he is. … Can’t talk to the others about it, of course,” Riddle says disconnectedly. “Most of them wouldn’t even look at me at the beginning. Called me half-blood, half-breed. Everything I’ve had to do to make them see who I am.”

Ron watches Riddle tap his long fingers on the boulder as if playing an invisible piano. Riddle doesn’t look resentful about any of this, but then, when has Ron ever allowed the rest of the world to see his resentment? Only ever Harry and Hermione, only ever a handful of glimpses. Never anyone else, because the world likes to see graciousness in its less fortunate. The world likes to see the poor with their heads held high, rising above circumstance, unable to be beaten back, never even feeling sorry for themselves. God forbid you wish you had it better.

Ron can’t imagine what it would have been like to be sorted into Slytherin. Ron’s a Pureblood, and even he would never have survived there.

“Are you dreaming, too?” Riddle says, looking curiously at Ron.

Ron thinks for a moment before saying, with feigned realization, “Yeah, that must be it.”

“But how are we meeting?” Riddle says with a light frown.

“I’m not sure.”

Riddle thinks for a long moment. Ron begins to feel uneasy. Is it him, or do Riddle’s eyes seem to be growing sharper? Is he beginning to understand what’s happening?

But just when he starts to think about ways to wake himself up, the world adjusts, as if Ron is looking through a camera and another lens has been screwed on. Things seem to have reset. He’s standing at the edge of the clearing again. The light is even richer and more beautiful than before, cascades of summer gold.

Riddle is still sitting on the boulder, though in a different position now, easier, more languid. He’s grown older again, taller. Ron glances down at himself and sees he is still gawky, not quite his full height. They’re sixth year, maybe.

When Riddle sees him, recognition passes over his face. “Hello again,” he says.

Ron cautiously approaches. “Hullo.”

“I was wondering if I would see you again,” Riddle says calmly. “I don’t think I’ve seen you at Hogwarts. You must have been before my time. A shade lingering in the forest.” His voice has settled now, no trace of reedy adolescence left. It’s a smooth, musical baritone.

“Yeah, maybe,” Ron says. “I—er, I can’t remember when I was there.” He settles on the boulder across from Riddle and realizes how warm he feels, how at peace. This place is idyllic. Can’t he let himself relax for a moment, not think about Horcruxes for a moment?

“It’s nice, isn’t it?” Riddle says quietly, looking up at the boughs. “Out here, away from everything.”

“Yeah,” Ron sighs.

“I do all my studying for my O.W.L.s here. The others distract me. Would you like to see some of the Transfiguration I’ve been developing? It’s a spell of my own.”

Riddle takes his wand out, and Ron’s surprised to find that he’s not afraid. This boy is nothing like the idea of You-Know-Who he’s lived with all his life, the nameless shadow, the towering grotesque. He’s just a boy, and there’s something of Hermione in the way he’s eager to show Ron something he’s learned, and there’s something of Harry in the coordinated way he moves.

“Go on, then,” Ron says.

Riddle draws a pattern with his wandtip and mutters something under his breath, and a stick on the ground stands up into a dog with a lolling pink tongue and a shaggy gray coat. The dog gambols across the clearing toward Ron. “Not bad,” Ron says with a grin, scratching the dog behind its ears.

“What have you been doing?” Riddle says, pocketing his wand with a satisfied look and leaning back against an incline in the rock. “Since before?”

Ron hesitates. If Riddle thinks he’s some remnant of a past student in the Forbidden Forest, he can admit he exists outside the dream. “It’s all a bit hazy,” he says at last. “But I think I’ve been looking for something. For a long time.”

“What is it you’re looking for?”

“Well, it’s powerful.” Ron can’t help the note of pride that creeps into his voice. “And it’s important that w—that I find it.”

Riddle looks curious now. “There are lots of powerful things around Hogwarts,” he says.

Ron’s heart begins to beat a little more quickly. Maybe Harry’s right, and there  _is_ a Horcrux at Hogwarts. Maybe Riddle will unwittingly reveal what it is.

“I’m searching for something, too,” Riddle murmurs.

“What is it?”

Riddle eyes Ron a long moment before answering. “I have to be worthy.”

Ron blinks, taken aback. “Worthy?”

“Never mind,” Riddle says.

“No, what do you mean?”

Riddle looks down at his wand, which he turns over and over in his hands. “I haven’t spoken about this before.”

“It’s a dream,” Ron points out. “So you’re not really speaking about it, are you?”

A smile touches Riddle’s mouth. Still, it’s a while before he decides to speak. “I came from nothing,” he says. “I can never be nothing again.” He looks up and meets Ron’s eyes. The fine muscles in his eyelids are strained, the eyes slightly too wide, the brows cinched together. It is the look of terror, a seething mass of fear. “It is far too easy,” he says quietly, “to be nothing.”

Ron feels as if someone has driven a pick into his chest. “I know,” he says, strangled. Unwillingly he thinks of Hermione turning away from him, addressing Harry as if he weren’t sitting right there. He thinks of every time he and Hermione cheered Harry on from the Quidditch stands or during the Triwizard Tournament, how he imagined his and Harry’s positions switched. He thinks of his own mother fussing over Harry as if Ron were invisible. Since Harry arrived on Platform 9¾, he has been something. Ron is still finding his way there. Ron still isn’t sure he’s anything at all.

“You do know,” Riddle says, and the fear has changed tenors. He still looks vulnerable, but surprised, now, too, and keenly interested. “You understand. Why do you understand?”

“That’s been my whole life,” Ron says. “Trying to—to live up to … to my brothers, my …” His stomach twists. The words fight their way free, but they nauseate him. “Everyone in my life. I wish they thought of me like I was special. But I know none of them do, not really.”

Something in the atmosphere of the dream has changed. The summer heat has become too much, and thoughts of his family are piling atop him like stones: Fred and George flying out from Umbridge’s thumb, instant legends, and Bill and Charlie and Percy with their perfect lists of N.E.W.T.s, and Ginny casting such a strong hex that a teacher gave her admittance to an exclusive club instead of detention. What is Ron’s history? Latched onto by ribbons of brain tissue at a crucial moment, regurgitating slugs, mocked by everyone who saw him with Lavender Brown. Embarrassment after embarrassment.

The forest air is choking him. He sees Hermione’s face in a vision of desperation. Thinking through it all, he doesn’t know how she could want him. Not Harry Potter’s best friend, not when Harry could love her. Surely Harry loves her too. Ron knows he’s fond of Ginny, but Hermione is more to them both than anyone else.

And once Hermione realizes she loves Harry, once they’re together, what will be left for Ron, provided they even survive the year? Shreds of a former friendship, the reminder of days when all three of them felt equal? Ron will be best man at their wedding, drinking alone in the corner and trying to make jokes, disappearing early to creep away to drink himself out of his body at some pub, sick in a ditch. He sees the future as clearly as the present. When has his love for anything ever been enough?

Then Riddle speaks, and suddenly the pressure is gone from the world. The sunlight is gloriously intermixed with a gentle breeze, and Ron takes a deep, shuddering breath.

“What they think isn’t what’s true,” Riddle says with soft intensity. “The only truth is what you are.” For the first time Ron hears the power in his voice, but it isn’t frightening, isn’t intimidating. It makes him want to stand and proclaim himself.

The world clicks. Shifts. Resets.

Ron looks down at himself. He is finally himself, his true self, seventeen-nearly-eighteen, a nearly-healed gash across his arm. Across the clearing, Riddle is on his feet, slender and tall, though a few inches shorter than Ron.

“Still looking for that powerful thing?” Riddle asks quietly as Ron enters the clearing.

“Yeah,” Ron says.

“You sound tired,” Riddle says with a touch of amusement.

“Bloody exhausted,” Ron says, and then they’re both grinning, and honestly? It’s nice to have a little sympathy.  _It’s the least he can do,_ Ron thinks,  _being that all this is his fault._

He almost laughs at the thought, and suddenly everything seems silly. His previous resentment at Harry. The way they’re running through the woods. The fact that he’s here, standing across from Tom Riddle, having a perfectly reasonable conversation. How ridiculous it feels that just a week ago he was unable to sleep for terror about his family, when there’s no evidence they’re anything but fine, no evidence at all. In this place it seems obvious that everything will turn out all right.

“I still don’t know your name,” Riddle says.

And in that moment it seems stupid to Ron to conceal his eminently ordinary, anonymous first name. He says it.

The sunbeams shiver in the sky.

“I think I’m about to wake up,” Riddle says quietly. He’s leaning back against his boulder, arms crossed. “Will I see you again?”

The light catches his features then in such a way that Ron can’t look away. Riddle is beautifully constructed, Ron realizes: put together like art, his dark brows set over obsidian eyes in perfect symmetry.

And his posture. Ron doesn’t know how people stand that way, positioned somehow to exude self-certainty. It seems like it would be physically impossible for him. He’s always been a sloucher, always too tall and too long-limbed and taking up too much space, proportionally, for what he is.

Ron shifts uncomfortably and swallows.  _Voldemort,_ he tries to think.  _Voldemort._ The word should shock him into fear or revulsion, but there is no fear or revulsion here; it can’t penetrate. Not Voldemort, but the boy in the orphanage. Not Voldemort, but the man the boy became. Complicated, human. Yearning, still, to be more.

Ron’s staring, he realizes. The last time he couldn’t look away from a boy, it was Viktor Krum at the Quidditch World Cup, his grim hawklike profile irresistibly striking, and later when Krum arrived at Hogwarts, Ron’s heart flew into a frantic sprint every time he saw the Seeker trudging around the castle. Everyone assumed it was the admiration of an especially ardent fan, and that was all right, wasn’t it, because Krum turned out to be trying to steal Hermione from right under his nose. Since then it’s only ever been Hermione.

Still, Ron has always noticed. He noticed Oliver Wood back in third year. He noticed Lee Jordan in fifth, although he didn’t even let himself think about it, because the grief he would have gotten from Fred and George was beyond thought.

Noticing always felt safe, because who would notice him? That was the thing that drew him to Lavender, really, the fact that she looked at him with genuine interest—that when she looked at him, she seemed to want to keep looking. She was attractive, Lavender, always one of the best-looking people in their year.

But not like this. She wasn’t poised and certain, like this. She couldn’t skewer him with her eyes like a lepidopterist’s pin. She wasn’t— _impressive_ , like this, and actually now that Ron’s thinking about it he can’t think of anyone who is. He’s never seen anything like this before. Riddle is authority in every minuscule motion. Riddle is moving toward him with his hands clasped behind his back, and Ron’s mouth is drying up, and his palms are sweating. He wipes them on his robes and doesn’t know where to look. He wants to step back, he is trying desperately to remember why he is here, but his memories feel blurry, like they’re littered at the bottom of a pot of steaming water. He cannot reach in to retrieve them.

He wakes up gasping for breath.

* * *

 

The next several days feel unreal. In the daytimes he traipses after Harry and Hermione, listening to them debate the possibilities of where to go. Ron chimes in at calculated intervals, often enough that he never seems pointedly quiet, and it seems to mollify his friends completely. He can’t believe they haven’t noticed a difference in him.

Or maybe they have noticed a difference, but they’re talking about it behind his back. Bizarrely, he finds he doesn’t care, and it’s quite possibly the most liberating feeling he’s ever had. Simple detachment. He’s no longer dependent on them. He has left some wriggling needy childish part of himself in some copse in the woods and it must have weighed a hundred pounds, for how light his steps feel now.

Ron feeds them a story about having gotten used to the Horcrux. He has methods, he says, for letting its effects slide off him. On the third day, he lifts the Horcrux from around his neck just to see how he feels without it, and feels a heavy gloom drop onto him like a lead blanket. When he lets the necklace fall back into place, though, everything clarifies. He can see the beauty in the trees. He helps Hermione forage for edible things. They get along.

He doesn’t say a word about the dreams. Every so often he remembers that he’s doing this because he wants to find out where the other Horcruxes are. There is, he remembers, a vague sense of a mission here. The reason feels warm, and contents him.

He still can’t speak about the dreams, though, because they’re  _his_ , and he knows he wouldn’t be able to describe them correctly; the very thought of them is as intoxicating as perfume. The closest thing he’s ever felt was that package of chocolates containing love potion last year.

Except that this isn’t the same. He doesn’t feel stupid or lovesick. He feels energized by his own potential, all the adrenaline of a Quidditch match going through him at all hours of the day, and he can examine himself in new and flattering ways. More and more often, he finds himself forgetting to think of Riddle as Voldemort. Really, they’re separate things. Voldemort is a monster; Tom Riddle is a person. Voldemort is the thing he is still actively seeking to destroy. Tom Riddle was a child just like him and turned into someone confident and magnetic. Why can’t Ron be the same?

In the dreams, Ron grows bolder. He and Riddle greet each other cautiously, then like friends, and days seem to go by in the sunlit place, and Riddle speaks about his Hogwarts, about how everybody else is blinded by their wealth and privilege. It’s easy to bond over their mutual hatred of snobbish, entitled Slytherins.

“ _You_  would make a better Slytherin,” Riddle tells him one night.

“Come off it,” Ron scoffs.

“Far better,” Riddle says with the same easy authority. “True Slytherins aspire to more than strutting around, lord of the classroom. True Slytherins dream of real accomplishment.” He pauses, looking Ron over. “I know you’ve imagined it. What you could do if you weren’t always shoving yourself down beneath layers of modesty.”

“What are you, the Sorting Hat?” Ron says, but Riddle is approaching him, beckoning for his wand. Ron gives it to him. Riddle examines the wand, then hands it back.

“Cast  _Reducto_ ,” Riddle tells him.

Ron shrugs, aims his wand at the nearest boulder, and opens his mouth, but Riddle cuts in:

“Non-verbally.”

Ron gives him a disbelieving look. “We only had a couple of months of nonverbal training. Nobody could do it except my friend Hermione, and even she can’t do it with advanced hexes yet.”

“Is that true?” Riddle says neutrally. “Or did you decide that it was true before you gave any proper effort to it?”

Ron chews his tongue. While he’s still standing there, holding his wand out foolishly, Riddle says, “ _Now._ ”

Ron reacts instinctively. His mind goes blank except for the single word:  _Reducto._  He slashes his wand forward, and the spell pours out of his wand, and in the next moment the boulder is reduced perfectly to dust.

Ron lowers his wand, staring, and lets out a disbelieving laugh. “Did you— _did you see that?_ ” he yelps. “Did you see what I just did?”

The next day, in the woods, he tries the same thing with a stump. It splinters inward on itself with such force that Hermione comes running, and he levitates a pile of earth onto it, also nonverbally, before she can see. He touches the Horcrux, and it seems to hum.

One night he and Riddle fall into speaking about Hermione.

“… but she’s interested in my friend, I’m sure of it,” Ron says glumly. “You know, the famous one.” He’s leaning against the side of the boulder, on top of which Riddle is lying, looking up at the canopy.

“Why do you love her?”

Ron feels himself turn bright red. “Wh—hold on, I never said I  _loved_ her, that’s—”

“Tell me why.”

Ron sighs and relents. “I … I don’t know. She’s brilliant, I s’pose. And she’s good. And she’s just … nobody else feels like they’re that much of themselves. Sometimes I can’t stand her, but she’s always  _her_.”

“It sounds as if your life would be easier without her.”

At this Ron blinks, disoriented. “What are you talking about?” he says sharply. Something in the light seems momentarily off, and he has a faint sense of foreboding.

“Only a joke,” Riddle murmurs.

The light settles. The ominous feeling fades. Ron shakes his head, still feeling slightly off-kilter. A joke, right, of course. Stupid to think anything else.

“You haven’t ever been involved with anyone, have you?” Ron says.

Riddle lets out a quiet scoff.

“Right, my mistake,” Ron says. “So you’ll be useless at giving advice.”

“I don’t know about that.” Riddle slips off the side of the boulder beside Ron and lands quietly, catlike. “I am good with people when I want to be.”

Ron looks over at him. Riddle has his hands in the pockets of his robes, and Ron realizes he has mirrored him. Ron is standing with that posture he envied before, the type of confident poise he thought he could never manage.

“Unexpected,” Riddle says quietly. A flicker of surprise crosses his face, then, as if he didn’t mean to say the word.

“What is?” Ron says. “What’s unexpected?”

“We do have certain similarities.” Riddle takes a step toward Ron. “There is an understanding.”

“Yeah,” Ron says quietly. The sentence is so stupidly short,  _there is an understanding,_ as if that means anything by itself. Yet Ron knows exactly what he’s saying. There is a current of sameness, two parallel rivers. There is a synchronized element between them. They want in the same language and fear in the same language. And to want in the same language and fear in the same language and stand one foot apart feels like a sensory explosion, as it turns out. To understand somebody in the ways that Ron now understands Riddle is a kind of exquisite torture.

Ron doesn’t know when he stopped being wary of all this, when he stopped searching the boy opposite him for clues and started looking for the pleasure of it, but it has become all pleasure. Coming to this place is a hedonistic hit to the reward centers of his animal brain and here he can think of himself as someone powerful, worthy, interesting. His intrusion into this place is the focus of the miniature universe.

Satisfaction passes over Riddle’s face. “I feel it,” he says quietly. “The thing you’re feeling.”

“Yeah?” Ron says, remembering when Riddle had first spoken about trying to find his father, the empathetic shock that resounded through the clearing. The air is a transmitting fluid in this place, and through it everything reverberates. Ron listens, waits. He looks at Riddle, and like a radio receiver he tunes into Riddle’s frequency.

Riddle is feeling the sort of absolute self-assurance that Ron has always wanted, that Ron has always thirsted for. He’s feeling the attraction of like feeding into like, building upon itself like a microphone’s piercing whine, to an unbearable peak. He’s sharing it with Ron, and Ron drinks it in. The feeling is so powerful that he leans forward, toward Riddle, as if magnetized. He feels drunk.

Riddle draws a deep breath through his mouth, as if tasting the air.  _All your dreams of love and glory,_ Ron hears as if Riddle is speaking, but the lips aren’t moving. The dark eyes are fixed on him, tracing every curve of his face.  _You can have their love. Would I give you mine if you were anything but worthy?_

“Of course not,” Ron says, trancelike.

_I have seen your heart and it is mine. The troughs of your terror and the summits of your desire._ _People like us cannot wait for what we want to arrive. People like us have to take what we want._

Ron seizes the front of Riddle’s robes with a hand that squeezes into a fist. All the humiliating hallmarks of being Ron Weasley are gone. His palms are not sweating any longer. He is not turning red or stammering or looking away. He is going to do what he wants. This is how he will live the rest of his life.

“Take what I want,” he says. He feels deeply buried inside himself and impossibly far away. There is an empathetic pulse of power ricocheting through the clearing and Ron doesn’t know whether it’s Riddle’s or his own.

 _Everything you want,_ Riddle says.

Ron leans down through the beautiful light and kisses him, and something is pouring out of him where they meet, like static cling rubbing hotter and hotter to the electric point, and there is a sort of explosion.

Suddenly Ron is half awake. He opens his eyes in the apartment inside the tent, but the quality of the world around him is still the dream’s. Like a painted fresco. Every color pure, despite the darkness.

Hermione is still in her bunk, asleep. Harry’s bunk is empty.

 _Everything you’ve dreamed of,_ says the dark, lovely voice that is still before him, as if Riddle were standing there.  _You can share your new self with your best friend. Show him this new confidence. Show him who you have always been._ Ron stands and dresses quietly, but when he goes outside, Harry isn’t there. Ron sees a pathway of damaged twigs and leaves leading into the forest.

 _See how easily you found the way,_ says the voice, sounding satisfied, as Ron follows after Harry, wand drawn and lit.  _The mark of a quick mind and sharp intuition._ Ron follows Harry’s footsteps and tracks a while. The trail isn’t subtle. It’s as if Harry was chasing something through the woods.

The moonlight is liquid silver. The woods have never been so beautiful. Ron realizes he is smiling, grinning widely as he plows through the trees, eyes wide to take it all in. All his life, everything could have been this beautiful, if only he had known his own potential so well before.

Then he sees the pool. The water is disturbed. Harry has clearly just dived in; his clothes lie in a pile on the bank.  _There,_ says Riddle’s voice.  _Time to show him everything you’ve realized._

 _Yes_ , Ron thinks, and he’s more excited than he has ever been. More excited than before the Quidditch final last year, more excited than when they stormed the Ministry, more excited than he was as a first-year to have won fifty points for Gryffindor in front of the whole school. He’s going to show Harry that he is important, too. That he makes choices; that he is worth something; that he affects the world.

Ron approaches the pool and looks down into the dark water. Harry looks impossibly far below and is retrieving some gleaming length of silver. The Horcrux is beating on Ron’s chest like a heart.  _Time to show him who is important, who is strong, who should never have been doubted,_ says Riddle’s voice.  _Draw your wand._

Ron doesn’t move. He’s still grinning down at the pool, lost in these blissful ideas. How does it feel to be somebody? He always wondered. This is how it feels.

 _Remember standing on the sidelines all those years,_ says Riddle’s voice more urgently.  _Now is the time to act. Now is always the time to act. Hesitation is regret. Hesitation is insignificance. Draw your wand._

The world seems to tremble. Ron’s smile falters, and his eyes unfix from the surface of the pool.

He’s struck by the sensation of paranoia. Something is wrong inside his feeling, this precious feeling it took so many years to find. There’s something writhing around inside the happiness and the self-assurance. He should just draw his wand, really. Should just draw it.

But—

The wand is already in his hand. He doesn’t remember drawing it. That’s strange, isn’t it?

 _You’re doing well,_ the voice is telling him.  _Now freeze the ice._

Ron looks down at his wand and the moonlight is catching it strangely. The wand seems to be drinking in all the light. The light is sliding off his hand in a way that doesn’t seem right. The light is slithering all around.

 _Think of how impressed he’ll be,_ says the voice.  _Nonverbal spellcasting. A spell even Hermione doesn’t know._

But the thought of Hermione only seems to fracture the world a little more. Ron looks up and suddenly he can feel his heart racing along inside his ribcage, and the trees seem large and threatening, not quite the beautiful painting he was flying through earlier. The moon pulses like an injury.  _Hermione_ , he thinks.

 _This is the only way to get to Hermione,_ says Riddle’s voice now.  _Do you want her to love you in return? Show her you are the one who will keep her safe. Freeze the ice._

There is motion near the bottom of the pool.

 _Freeze the ice,_ says the voice. It is changing. The smooth baritone has turned to a hiss.  _Freeze the ice. Freeze it!_

Higher, now, and twisted. A new voice, one Ron has never heard. _Freeze the ice! FREEZE THE ICE!_

Ron’s hand is outstretched and trembling. He realizes he knows the incantation, though he has never learned it. He can’t let himself think it, because the power will pour out through his wand, not his power at all, not his own intent, his body but not his mind, and if the word passes through his mind, he realizes—

_I’ll lose Harry._

Harry. His best friend. He sees Hogwarts at Christmas, Harry flabbergasted that he got presents. He sees Harry’s face behind the bars at the Dursleys’ window. He sees Harry wolfing bacon at the start of term like he hasn’t been fed for months, because he hasn’t. He sees Harry shooting horrible pretend fates back at him for Trelawney’s star charts, and Harry after he survived that Horntail, when they put all this behind them—when Ron knew once and for all that there were some things more important than recognition—

The world ruptures. The last of the dream cracks and collapses. He flies back into himself like a clenched fist, bowed over and trembling, gasping for breath, uncomposed. Everything is ugly and freezing cold. He realizes he is pouring sweat, that his hair is plastered to his forehead.

But the Horcrux is awake. It’s always been awake, Ron realizes. Always been waiting. There wasn’t a moment it didn’t know who he was and what he was trying to do. And now it’s burning on his chest like a bonfire and there is a screaming all through his head.

_FREEZE THE ICE!_

“No,” Ron croaks out. “I won’t—do it—I WON’T DO IT!”

He bellows the words and the wand flies from his hand. He’s thrown it without realizing, flung it into the trees just as Harry surfaces from the pool with a gasp and stares at Ron in disbelief.

“Harry,” he gasps. “Harry—help me—”

Harry seizes the Horcrux from around his neck. His cold wet hand sizzles as the heat of the metal touches it. He yanks the necklace from Ron and with it gone, Ron feels as if he’s been struck with a sledgehammer. He falls to his knees.

“Ron,” Harry says. “You’ve got to do it now! Now, all right?”

Harry is molding his hand around some cold piece of metal. Ron looks down and realizes he’s holding Gryffindor’s sword.

The crushing futility of it presses in on him. This isn’t who he is. He will never wield Gryffindor’s sword. He is nothing. “I can’t,” Ron gasps. “I can’t …”

“You can, mate,” Harry urges. “I  _know_  you can.”

Harry seizes him by the forearms and helps him totter to his feet. Ron looks into his best friend’s face. “I nearly let it kill you,” he chokes. “It could have killed you.”

“But you didn’t,” Harry says fiercely. “Which means you saved my life. And we’ve done that about a hundred times for each other, and I don’t reckon we’re going to stop anytime soon.”

Ron gasps for breath. He can’t answer. He knows, if the locket opens, what Harry will see. He knows everything that will be betrayed to Harry, everything laid bare about himself, every last fraction of his hideous jealousy and his agonizing insecurity.

For a moment it feels as if it would be easier to fall on this sword than to admit any of it.

But in the next moment, he thinks of what he was without it.

“Open it,” he says hoarsely. “Open it.” He lifts the sword. “I’m ready.”

Harry turns to the locket and makes a sound like a snake’s hiss. It clicks open.


End file.
